NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL's primary function is the construction and operation

of planetary robotic spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth orbits and astronomy missions,

and it's responsible for operating NASA's Deep Space Network. On this episode, you'll meet

Chris Matman. He's the division manager for artificial intelligence, analytics, and innovation at

NASA's JPL, and he's JPL's first principal scientists in the area of data science. We cover a

wide range of topics and dive into how Python and open source are growing in the space exploration

field, and he answers the question of whether he thinks will have Python running on robots

and rovers in space. This is Talk Python to Me. Episode weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities.

This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter where I'm at M. Kennedy.

Keep up with a show and listen to past episodes at TalkP.com. And follow the show on Twitter via at TalkPython. This episode is brought to you by Linode and Monday.com. Please check out what they're offering during their segments. It really helps support the show. Chris, welcome to Talk Python to me. Hey, Michael, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here and hi to your listeners.

Well, I almost don't know where to start.

There's so many things that you have done in Python in the open source space that I think is going to be really fun to talk about.

But I think let's focus mostly on space and JPL and that.

And then we'll get to what I think will be a surprisingly large and impressive list of interesting things that you've done.

And so we'll start our conversation there, but before we get actually into that, let's just start with how you got to programming in Python.

Yeah, well, it's a long story.

So I came from the Java world,

rewind the clock maybe, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago. And I grew up in a trailer in Santa Clarita.

It's about an hour north of L.A. And let's see, my childhood wasn't super interesting. But anyways,

I became a teenager. I'd like to tell people, I think I had my first longer than five-minute

conversation with my father when I was a teenager, when, you know, my brother who was out

...